Workflow guide · 4 minute read
Review missing and duplicate page titles
Title problems are easy to count and tedious to trace. Isolate the affected pages, confirm what the crawler found, and work out whether the fix belongs in one record or in the template producing dozens of them.
Best for page-level QA, CMS migrations, template releases, and content inventories
18-second workflow
Find the page, then confirm the title problem.
Recorded in the installed SEO Crawler 0.1.8 app using deliberate public fixtures. The player loads only the light or dark recording that matches your system theme.
What happens in the demo
Start with the completed crawl
The Issues panel remains open and the table is reduced to URL, Status Code, and Title so every selection has a clear purpose.
Open Page Titles, then choose Missing
The table narrows from the full fixture crawl to the one page where no title was found.
Identify the affected URL
The missing-metadata fixture is selected before moving across the table, keeping the page attached to the finding.
Confirm that the Title cell is empty
The horizontal scrollbar brings the Title column into focus. The blank selected cell is the evidence, not an assumption based on the issue count.
Switch to Duplicate titles
Two service URLs appear with the same title. The final selections make the repeated text easy to compare without leaving the crawl.
Catch the template problem before editing pages one by one.
A blank title can leave search engines and browsers to infer a label. A repeated title makes different pages harder to distinguish and often points to a default value that escaped from a shared template or CMS field.
Use this workflow after launches, imports, taxonomy changes, and template updates. It is also useful when a content inventory has many similar URLs and you need to separate deliberate naming from accidental duplication.
Review the page and the title together.
- 1.
Run the crawl
Enter the site URL and wait for the crawl to finish. The demo uses the public Lil Robots fixture site so the results are safe and repeatable.
- 2.
Keep only the useful columns
In Pages, open Filter and show URL, Status Code, and Title. Freeze URL if you need to move horizontally while keeping the affected page visible.
- 3.
Review missing titles
Expand Page Titles in the Issues panel and choose Missing. Select each URL, then verify that its Title cell is actually empty.
- 4.
Review duplicate titles
Choose Duplicate and compare the URLs alongside the repeated title. Look for a shared template, copied CMS default, or pages that serve the same intent.
Practice with the public crawler fixtures. The missing and duplicate titles are intentional test data.
Decide whether the fix is local or shared.
- Missing title
- Confirm that the page should be indexable and has a distinct purpose. Add a concise, descriptive title at the content or template source instead of hiding the symptom with a crawl filter.
- Duplicate title on different page types
- A shared default is the likely starting point. Check layout metadata, CMS fallbacks, and imported fields before opening separate tickets for every URL.
- Duplicate title on genuinely similar pages
- Do not rewrite text merely to make a report turn green. First decide whether the pages serve separate search intents, should be consolidated, or need a canonical relationship.
Fix the source, deploy, and crawl again.
Change the title in the CMS, page metadata, or shared template that owns it. Then recrawl the affected URLs and confirm that Missing or Duplicate no longer contains the pages you intended to fix.
A useful handoff includes the URL, current title, proposed title or naming rule, page intent, and template owner. When several pages share the cause, assign the rule once and list the URLs as verification cases.
Export the affected pages for handoff